Christopher Boyce & Andrew Daulton Lee

Cait Mills, the tall, athletic redhead with whom Boyce had formed a romantic relationship while fighting for parole, met him at the San Francisco airport, a picnic lunch in hand. A paralegal, Mills had worked on Andrew Daulton Lee's 1998 release. She told Serrano that as Boyce walked up the ramp, their eyes met and "then he had this huge smile."

Although Boyce despised the halfway house, it allowed him three-day passes and he spoke to Serrano about how he relished those periods of freedom. "When I first got here, when I first got to the halfway house," he recalled, "I just wandered around San Francisco for about four or five days on the streetcars and on the trolley cars. Just looking."

On one of those passes, he and Cait wed amidst redwoods and surrounded by Boyce's family. Boyce told Serrano that his wife had greatly helped his adjustment to the free world. "It would be ten times more difficult if I didn't have Cait," he claimed.

He spent much of his time doing the sort of simple things that most people take for granted. "On weekends I barbecue in the backyard," he said. "I lie in the hammock watching the clouds go by. I like taking the dogs for walks in the park."

His enjoyment of the outdoors was heightened because, as he had written in a column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, "in federal custody, nature seems reduced to cockroaches, ants and flies."

Always fascinated by birds and flying, he spoke of his joy at once again being able to observe birds: "Watch the ravens out around the beach. You can walk right up to them....I went up to the tops of the hills of San Francisco, and a flock of about a hundred parrots flew past."

His wife gifted him with a pair of binoculars and Boyce frequently used them to "spot a peregrine falcon."

Serrano noted that, in at least one respect, Boyce was different from most longtime prisoners: he had not one tattoo. However, Boyce also seemed like the murderer he had written about whose development was stunted when he said in outdated slang, "Parole is a great gas."

In the years since his parole, Boyce has stayed out of trouble and out of the news. Perhaps he does not want to again break the hearts of those dear to him; perhaps he knows that obeying the law is a small price to pay for the freedom to watch his beloved falcons fly.